Assessing Yourself and Your Environment

One common focus of coaching in organizational settings is to work with an employee to construct a personal development plan. In this SLP, you will be developing your own Leadership Growth Plan (LGP).  The purpose is to have you learn the steps to developing such a plan so you can help others you are coaching to do the same, but also to come out of the class with a personal plan for your own development as a leader.

Why create a Leadership Growth Plan?

It is one thing to want to be a good leader.  It is another thing to achieve it.  Research shows that people who have a vision for where they want to go and then write it down and develop a plan to achieve it, are more successful than people who do not.  An LGP is designed to help you assess your current skills and capacities as a leader, set goals, and make a plan for enhancing your effectiveness by acquiring new skills.

For an example of what a personal leadership growth plan might look like, see the following:

Create a Personal Leadership Growth Plan (n.d.) Retrieved from http://www.myafchome.org/assets/Convention/2012_Convention/personal%20leadership%20growth%20plan-ew.pdf

Guide to the Completion of a Personal Development Plan. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.collegiovolta.org/images/example_pdp_2016.pdf

Assignment Instructions

In this module, we will begin with the first phase of creating your plan.  You will engage in some assessment and reflection addressed toward giving you a picture of Who am I? Then you will write up what you have learned about yourself in a two- to three-page paper. The paper should be an integrated essay assessing your current attributes and capabilities as a leader.  Do not just line up the four topics below and report on them as in a short-answer test.  Use them to tell the story of who you are.
Keys to the Assignment

To assess yourself as a leader, consider the following and incorporate your answers into your paper.

What are your values?
Make a list of everything that is important to you in life.  Do not censor or edit anything, just get it all on paper. You may find that you think of things you would not have expected.

Read through the list several times, choose the five most important values, and list them in order of importance.
Define each value in terms of why it is important to you.
What is your leadership style?

You have undoubtedly assessed your leadership style in one or more classes or at work.  If you can recall your dominant style, name and describe it. The most common styles are authoritarian, consulting, participative, and delegating, but there are others.
Using the authoritative style, you tend to make all important decisions, including how jobs are performed.

Using the consulting style, you ask for employee input, but then make the decision yourself.

Using the participative style, you involve employees as partners in the decision.
Using the delegating style, you empower employees to make the decisions on their own as appropriate.

If you want to take a new assessment questionnaire, there are many on the Internet.  Just cite the instrument you are using.
What motivates you?
Not everyone is motivated by the same things.  What does it for you?  Compensation, titles, perks, social status, money, helping others, doing a good job, winning?
Repeat the process you used in assessing your values.
How are your skills in the following competencies?
Developing subordinates:  fostering employee engagement and commitment to the job and the organization, developing job-related skills and abilities, building decision-making capabilities, encouraging personal accountability for job responsibilities.
Modeling desirable behaviors:  As a leader you are the voice of the organization.  You exemplify its ethics, values, and expectations of employees.  You do not ask people to do things you would not do yourself.
Challenging the status quo:  Are you willing to try something different, think outside the box, take risks?  Leaders do not simply accept things the way they have always been, but ask, “How can we do it better?”
Accountability:  Leaders take responsibility for getting the job done.  Leaders try new ideas, create action plans, and evaluate results.
SLP Assignment Expectations
Include a cover page and reference page in addition to the 2-3 pages of analysis described above.

Your paper should include introduction and conclusion paragraphs.
Use headings to indicate major sections of the report.
Cite and reference any outside sources.
Use APA formatting.
Proofread and edit your papers carefully. The expectation is zero errors.